The Open Group APAC Conference Highlights

Well the dust has settled now with the conclusion of The Open Group ‘Enterprise Transformation’ Conference held in Sydney, Australia for the first time on April 15-20. Enterprise Architects is proud to have been recognised at the event by The Open Group as being pivotal in the success of this event. A number of our clients including NBN, Australia Post, QGC, RIO and Westpac presented excellent papers on leading edge approaches in strategy and architecture and a number of EA’s own thought leaders in Craig Martin, Christine Stephenson and Ana Kukec also delivered widely acclaimed papers.

Attendance at the conference was impressive and demonstrated that there is substantial appetite for a dedicated event focussed on the challenges of business and technology strategy and architecture. We saw many international visitors both as delegates and presenting papers and there is no question that a 2014 Open Group Forum will be the stand out event in the calendar for business and technology strategy and architecture professionals.

My top 10 take-outs from the conference include the following:

The universal maturing in understanding the criticality of Business Architecture and the total convergence upon Business Capability Modelling as a cornerstone of business architecture;

The improving appreciation of techniques for understanding and expressing business strategy and motivation, such as strategy maps, business model canvass and business motivation modelling;

That customer experience is emerging as a common driver for many transformation initiatives;

While the process for establishing the case and roadmap for transformation appears well enough understood, the process for management of the blueprint through transformation is not and generally remains a major program risk;

Then next version of TOGAF® should offer material uplift in support for security architecture which otherwise remains at low levels of maturity from a framework standardisation perspective;

ArchiMate® is generating real interest as a preferred enterprise architecture modelling notation – and that stronger alignment of ArchiMate® and TOGAF® meta models in then next versiob of TOGAF® is highly anticipated;

There is industry demand for recognised certification of architects to demonstrate learning alongside experience as the mark of a good architect. There remains an unsatisfied requirement for certification that falls in the gap between TOGAF® and the Open CA certification;

Australia can be proud of its position in having the second highest per capita TOGAF® certification globally behind the Netherlands;

While the topic of interoperability in government revealed many battle scarred veterans convinced of the hopelessness of the cause – there remain an equal number of campaigners willing to tackle the challenge and their free and frank exchange of views was entertaining enough to justify worth the price of a conference ticket;

Unashamedly – Enterprise Architects remains in a league of its own in the concentration of strategy and architecture thought leadership in Australia – if not globally;

If you didn’t make it to the conference – most of the papers are available online here. Note: You may need to register to access the content.

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